Re: Simple signs
"slow obstruction in road".
That's a bit of an understatement. "Totally static non-moving (on less than geological timescales) obstruction in road" would be more like it.
Posts by Stoneshop
5954 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
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Furious English villagers force council climbdown over Satan's stone booty
Oz uni in right royal 'indigenous' lingo rumpus
Here's a great idea: Let's make a gun that looks like a mobile phone
Wednesday 30th March 2016 12:28 GMT
Re: "Absolutely no one can make sense of the United States' infatuation with firearms."
You don't need a handgun to get groceries.
How in hell are you to subdue wild spinach without one? Club it? Stab it with a pitchfork? That's so going to destroy its flavour.
(The one with the Ray Mears/Julia Child "The Compleat Survivalist Gourmet Cookbook" in the pocket)
William Hague: Brussels attacks mean we must destroy crypto ASAP
Wednesday 30th March 2016 11:55 GMT
Re: Coded, not encrypted
If I were an evil autocrat, I'd tell every newspaper that if they're found to have passed a message that caused a massacre, their assets would be seized, forcing them to vet all their ads for fear of that.
"Next week friday special: beef mincemeat. Butcher Fillinsomename"
Let’s re-invent small phones! Small screens! And rubber buttons!
Friday 25th March 2016 17:13 GMT
Re: "Honestly, app developers, what on earth are you thinking of? "
There is no methodology that copes with dysfunctional managers other than Stalin's, and this has its own disadvantages.
His method was quite sound; his criteria for determining dysfunctionality however were rather divergent from those considered commonly usable in real life. Which turned out to be somewhat suboptimal in the runup to WW2.
Water treatment plant hacked, chemical mix changed for tap supplies
Microsoft did Nazi that coming: Teen girl chatbot turns into Hitler-loving sex troll in hours
Wait! Where did you get that USB? Super-stealthy trojan only drives stick
Wednesday 23rd March 2016 18:26 GMT
Re: How strong willed would you have to be to not plug in a USB stick you found in the street?...
Sticks left in the parking lot tend to be aimed at Windows, or maybe (if applicable and the perpetrators having done their homework) Linux. In both cases the architecture will be x86.
So you put the stick in a RPi or something similar running a bunch of tools that are aimed at peeking into the stuff on the stick, including low-level structures and such, and figuring out if it's kosher. The OS and tools should be on a hard write-protected SD card, or a sacrificial one. Then you put the stick in a MIPS-based machine running a similar (but not the same) set of tools.
Machines with a different architecture can also be used as a front-end for the actual airgapped machine: Instead of putting a stick to be written to in the machine itself, it transfers the data to a RPi via a dedicated link, which the Pi then writes to the stick. Of course this requires the Pi to be subject to the same security audits as the actual system.
Champagne supernova in the sky: Shockwaves seen breaking star
True believers mind-meld FreeBSD with Ubuntu to burn systemd
Stop! Before you accept that Windows 10 Mobile upgrade, read this
Swede builds steam-powered Raspberry Pi. Nowhere to plug in micro-USB, then?
Saturday 19th March 2016 11:44 GMT
Re: Voltage Drop
I'm amazed that such a small steam engine can produce enough power to run a minicomputer as well as a microcomputer.
I can't readily find actual power output numbers for the D10, but doing a bit of arithmetic with dimensions and data for other models, I end up with 300..400W at the crank*. With a suitable generator and voltage regulating gear you might indeed be able to run a last-generation '11 CPU with a bit of memory and a modern** disk.
It won't be a fully kitted-out /70 with a bunch of RM05s and a TS11.
* But as I'm not a steam engine surgeon, this could be totally off.
** SATA interfaces vividly remind me of SDA.
Friday 18th March 2016 23:09 GMT
Re: Nope
Bicycle dynamos perform just fine, generating AC without an exciter coil. Most motorcycle dynamos also have a permanent magnet with a stationary coil; only Bosch-type generators use an exciter coil for which you theoretically need the battery to have some charge to bootstrap the process (but often the rotor tends to have enough permanent magnetism to do so even without a battery).
Generators with an exciter coil are easier to regulate to a particular output voltage even with a simple mechanical voltage regulator. For a dynamo you'd need a hefty zener or robust stuff that shorts the output.
Friday 18th March 2016 16:43 GMT
Nope
He's using too small a regulator. The generator is capable of delivering 17V at 1A, so 17W, but he's using a 7805 linear regulator with a current-limited output. A larger capacitor won't help; a switching regulator would be able to convert 17V @ 1A to 5V @ 3A, which would run the Pi without dropping out.
And a bleed resistor for a low-voltage buffer? Total overkill.
Friday 18th March 2016 16:34 GMT
Re: Voltage Drop
He's using a linear regulator (plain 7805), which, apart from simply dissipating the voltage difference as heat, has a current limit of one amp. Which is just a tad low for booting a Pi, and some extra capacitors won't help you there.
On the forum they're talking about him having to fit a switching regulator instead.
Too Naked for the Nazis streaks to literary glory
Domino's trials trundling four-wheeled pizza delivery bot
Web ads are reading my keystrokes and I can’t even spel propperlie
How to make the trains run on time? Satellites. That's how
Friday 18th March 2016 13:05 GMT
Re: Not really necessary
and don't have conflicting traffic to slow them down.
They do. Maybe you wouldn't want to call all of the causes 'traffic', but that's beside the point.
In no particular order: wildlife, mechanical failures, suicides, yoofs playing silly buggers, electrical and/or comms failures, leaves on track, snow on track, other stuff on track*, human error**, sabotage.
* trees, vehicles, drunks, etc.
** Failing to top off the fuel tank (not as exciting as the Gimli Glider, but a problem nonetheless). A freight of steel sheets shifting during transport due to not being tied down securely and knocking several dozen catenary poles out of true. And much more of that.
FAA's 'drone smash risk to aircraft' is plane crazy
Thursday 17th March 2016 11:45 GMT
Re: The danger to an aircraft...
Perusing the category "Mid-air collisions" on Aviation-safety.net, it's a toss-up whether a collision between a jetliner and a Cessna-class aircraft would cause the jetliner to crash. It's something you don't want anyway, but it's not necessarily fatal to the occupants of the jetliner. So, extrapolating a bit from that data, a collision with a drone isn't likely to cause fatalities, but it will definitely result in a significant repair bill.
And as long as the drone controller is untraceable the bill won't end up there.
Brits seek rousing name for polar research vessel
Microsoft Surface Book: Shiny slab with a Rottweiler grip on itself
Thursday 17th March 2016 09:33 GMT
Re: Designed to walk away on its own
Way back in the days of CRTs* worth nicking**, there was a precursor to the Kensington lock which you epoxied to the case.
But I fail to see why one would put one of these to kiosk duty in a public space when there are other machines that could easily fill that role for a fraction of the price.
* Stuff like an 21" Eizo or NEC Multisync
** "Did anyone see an Arnold Schwarzenegger lookalike trying to inconspicuously leave the premises with a rather bulging jacket?"
Microsoft's done a terrible job with its Windows 10 nagware
Monday 14th March 2016 18:36 GMT
Re: Creating a problem..
Microsoft's marketing department, with this strategy, and the spyware is shooting itself in the foot however
Way past shooting themselves in the foot already; they're machinegunning their knees with gay abandon.
I'm looking forward to them deploying their groin-pointing Gatling.
Monday 14th March 2016 18:12 GMT 
... to inform people when their upgrade is ready.
Ah yes, make it sound like it's something personalised, something that's unique to you.
The Advertising ID is, but having it wrapped in some 3GB of not at all unique stuff does devalue the uniqueness somewhat, doesn't it?
And the bucket in which all your data will end up is also unique, but as it's not yours to access it is a bit hard to count that as 'yours'.
You say I mustn’t write down my password? Let me make a note of that
Friday 11th March 2016 18:47 GMT
Re: Clear desk policy
Card Controlled Access I find are usually crap, they mostly just magnets and most companies don't spend enough to cover all the doors.
Card access and CCTV notwithstanding, a couple of years back a bunch of thieving scrotes just heaved a pavement tile through a ground-floor window, and made off with a bunch of laptops.
Most of them not being locked.
And one of those being the security manager's.
'Microsoft Office has been the bane of my life, while simultaneously keeping me employed'
Wednesday 9th March 2016 22:06 GMT
Self-modifying shell script
I've worked with one of those, kindof, but it had a not entirely insane approach.
Due to the peculiarities of the command languages (yes, plural) involved, the initial script queried the user for some variables that had to be used in the second script, despite the language this second script was in not having any concept that even vaguely approached variables. So the first script wrote the second script with the required data in the appropriate places, using a fair amount of copying and appending boilerplate interspersed with lines built around the values contained in the variables. Once that part was done it connected to the target system, read the freshly-created script and fed it into the target system's command interpreter.
Most of it was actually pretty straightforward; only strings that the target system required being quoted ended up with (I think) five levels of escapes at the point where the first script was writing the second script.
Yelp-for-people app Peeple is back – so we rated Julia, its cofounder
Open trucker comms lets Shodan snoops alter routes, tap CANs buses.
Brit firm unleashes drone-busting net cannon
Saturday 5th March 2016 14:20 GMT
Re: RB-211
How the fscusck does an engine capable of engulfing 40 thousand pounds of ice filled cloud, birds included,
Because ice-filled cloud comes with its ice pre-chopped, or rather in hail stones that still need to grow to a point where one might think of them needing to be chopped on entering a turbine engine. And birds, while certainly capable of damaging an engine, rarely contain metallic bits that are even more capable of damaging an engine.
Electrified bird bum bomb shuts down US nuclear power plant
How the FBI will lose its iPhone fight, thanks to 'West Coast Law'
Saturday 5th March 2016 11:25 GMT
Re: Hyperbole
The ability to do as the Fbi ask does not exist, apples engineers have to effectively work out how to subvert their security and then build this
For this case the FBI is asking: "Build us a version that doesn't lock up after 10 tries, and does not delay between tries". Which would take one engineer with the relevant knowledge of that part of the code just a few hours to write and build, then maybe a few days to load and do test runs on a couple of scratch phones.
Regardless of the implications of this demand, it can hardly be called "knowledge that can't be unlearnt".
Norman Conquest, King Edward, cyber pathogen and illegal gambling all emerge in Apple v FBI
We're doing SETI the wrong and long way around, say boffins
Raspberry Pi celebrates fourth birthday with fruity version 3
Monday 29th February 2016 22:05 GMT
Re: Whichever way you slice it
When I can get reliable, free GPS and comms in the middle of the Sahara, I will be only too happy to do exactly that - until then, however, I'll have to do it differently.*
GPS is freely available all over the Sahara, as well as the Gobi and Atacama deserts, Greenland, Namibia, and whatever inaccessible location you feel you have to hike into and out of.
Comms may be unavailable, but that's neither the smartphone's fault nor will it be solved by taking a Pi. And lack of comms won't stop a smartphone from working as a camera and an ad-hoc file server.
Raspberry Pi 3 to sport Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE – first photos emerge
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
